With his soccer career stalled, Chris Zarou decided to comb Soundcloud, that’s where he found Logic, a guy living in a basement who was going to give it one more try.

Chris took the Megabus to go see his future client.

Mixtapes were released.

A deal was signed with IDJ, but with no product released. The advance was an investment.

Logic went on the road.

And eventually, he hit with the suicide song, “1-800-273-8255”

This is not your father’s music business. Chris isn’t even thirty. He relies on data, he combs it, and one of the most fascinating things he came across was the lack of bounce on streaming services after Logic’s appearance on the Grammys. There was an uptick on iTunes, but not on Spotify. I’m thinking everybody on Spotify already knew the track, Chris thought it was the oldsters who were buying it now.

So that Grammy bounce…

Radio is behind.

The Grammys are behind.

But Logic is not behind.

If you want to know how to build an act in today’s marketplace.

If you want to know how a young ‘un with no connections makes it.

If you want to know how the music business is the same, but different, still peopled by young entrepreneurs…

Then listen to this podcast.

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It was about the store on Sunset.

When you came to L.A., you went to the Whisky, the Troubadour, the Roxy and…

Tower Records.

It was on Sunset, in the era when there were billboards for albums. And on the outside of the nondescript building were paintings of albums. This was where music lived.

And unlike every other emporium on Sunset there was adequate parking. You could drop by on a whim.

And you never knew who you’d run into.

Close to midnight, Michael Caine and his wife. Another time the entire New York Knicks, I was standing next to Patrick Ewing, man was he tall.

But the key feature was the inventory. Who knows if they had everything, but they had more than everybody else, and at a reasonable price! And all the new releases were always cheap, as cheap as anywhere in town, and if you waited long enough you could pick up that catalog item at a low price too.

Now this was when Los Angeles was a bastion of neighborhood record stores. There was Aron’s in Hollywood and Rhino in Westwood. Being a company town you could buy promos in those stores. And they stocked used product. But if you wanted to see everything, if you wanted to feel on the pulse, if you wanted to go to where they opened up early for Elton John so he could fill up a shopping cart with albums…

You went to Tower.

Now right by the door were the rags, the throwaway magazines that have all been thrown away. You picked those up on your way out, you stuffed them into your yellow plastic bag.

And then in front of you, blocking your entrance, were the stacks. Hundreds of copies of new albums, not only the hits, but the obscure. You’d see all those copies of albums only you thought you knew about and feel included.

As for the help…

It wasn’t as insulting as Rhino, where they judged you by what you bought, but it was always aloof and never helpful. Ask for an item at Whole Foods and an employee will take you there. Ask for a record at Tower and they’d point you in the general direction, as if they were too busy to be bothered and you should know better.

So you got to know the system.

Under the bins were shelves of overstock. Which sometimes contained items that never made it to the bins. You’d comb through and see LPs you’d only read about. Seems amazing now, but to find a store with all the Neil Young albums, or all the Zappa LPs, was impossible. But Tower had them.

Until there just wasn’t room for them anymore.

Sometime in the eighties there were more SKUs than room.

And there was a switch from vinyl to cassettes to CDs. As freewheeling as the store was, the cassettes were in a walled-off section, to reduce theft, even though most of the stealing seemed to be done by employees, at least that’s the legend. Furthermore, they had a shrinkwrap machine in the back, so workers could borrow LPs and then return them, so product returned could be put right back on the shelves. That’s something that disappeared in the CD era, defective product, to get a good vinyl record was almost impossible.

There weren’t many events. This was not Amoeba, no, Tower was for EVERYBODY! You didn’t have to put on your look before you went, they sold no tchotchkes, it was only music, all the time.

And that’s where you got it, the store.

Radio was for discovery, but the passionate needed to own. And you didn’t want to go from store to store looking for your heart’s desire, you knew Tower had it. And buying was an addiction, however many records you had it was never enough, you needed more. And you bought ’em and played ’em, you had an investment, that’s why you knew all the album cuts.

And eventually there was a store in Westwood. With a ticket machine even. I remember lining up to buy tickets for the Boss at the Sports Arena.

And outlets in the Valley and Orange County, but they were never as big, never the same.

And, of course, Tower expanded to New York and Boston and although those stores were large, it came in the eighties, when music was in a cleanup mode, when MTV ruled and everybody knew all the acts, whereas in the seventies music still had a patina of exclusivity, you were in the know or you weren’t. And if you were…

You went to Tower.

Russ Solomon was a legend when retailers were a necessary component of the business. Now that role isn’t even played anymore. You kiss the ass of the streaming service, of which there are only a handful. And the issue is not getting your wares inside, but getting them listened to at all, the entire game has changed.

It won’t be long before Tower will be incomprehensible to the masses. You drove to a store to pay cash for only one album?

But we did.

And those times were so memorable because of the music itself, a magic elixir that drove the culture. It was what was on wax that mattered, not the amount of money made.

And it was all driven by recordings, the tour sold the album, not vice versa.

And the fact that a guy from Sacramento who was running a store could be so important…

But music always made strange heroes.

It’s not where you’re from or what you know so much as how much you care and what risks you’ll take.

Russ Solomon took tons of risk. Drove the chain to bankruptcy ultimately.

Then again, it was doomed by the internet.

But for a while there…

It all went down at Tower Records.

Distribution is king, now more than ever. Meet the new gatekeeper, same as the old gatekeeper, only different.

If you want to get your message out, you must do it on a social network. I.e. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter. Tumblr’s a moribund also-ran and Pinterest has hit a ceiling and is no longer a part of the discussion. It’s been a run for the roses, and mixing metaphors now the gold has been awarded, and it’s gone to those outlets above. Is social media forever? I think in an overwhelming interconnected world we’re about to hit a backlash where it’s more about person to person, maybe enabled by the web, but live nonetheless. No, I’m not one of those anti-technology people, lamenting the present, never mind the future, I’m just saying that the more we’ve moved online the more alienated we’ve become, the more information we have the less we know, and this has become personally unsatisfying. No, the problem isn’t porn or violence or digital books or any of the rest of the bogeymen, it’s just that there’s no there there. You want to find the pulse, and you cannot, you always feel left out, like you’re missing something. The only thing we have in common, that we can talk about, is politics, and even there we’re starting from different points, we all get different news. So just like millennials have turned to experiences, their elders will too. Once again, this is ENABLED by technology, you meet people online, i.e. dating apps, you organize online, but you end up in real life. As for the documentation of events via Instagram, et al, that’s gonna fade like live tweeting awards programs. When given the option people want to preserve privacy, and although they’re coughing it up regularly, they can see that there’s a cost, and they don’t want all their adventures online. So, expect boasters to continue to say how great their lives are, but many people will either make their feeds private or refuse to post whatsoever.

But that’s on the receiving end. What if you are selling?

1. Be where the eyeballs are.

Don’t make a deal with Hulu, never mind Apple or Amazon, you don’t want to be the one plowing the way. There’s no critical mass on Apple, so you’re not being paid enough to bring people in, assuming they come at all. Same deal with Hulu.

2. Don’t sign with someone in transition.

It’s like putting out physical product in the era of iTunes, never mind Spotify. You don’t want to make a deal with an outlet that’s got no path to the future. Other than HBO, almost no cable outlet stands alone, they’re all features of the challenged cable universe. So when cable goes, so do they, unless they find a bridge to the future, but they’re so busy protecting their old model they refuse to do this. So you’re better off on Netflix than TNT or TBS or even CBS, which has an app with little traction.

3. Prepare to get lost.

Netflix will pay you, but they won’t promote you.

Look at the Chris Rock special. It never even made it to the cultural zeitgeist. Chris got beaucoup bucks, but no one is talking about it. And Letterman has stumbled with his interview show, which will be resuscitated when Howard Stern appears, but then will probably fall straight back into the dumper. Letterman is now niche. Rock needed to do his own promotion. Sure, he could have made a deal with HBO…

Which brings us to the next point of transition… YOU CAN BE TOO EARLY! If you’re a big star and you’re playing short term it might be advantageous to do it the old way. HBO promotes passionately, it still reaches people in a way Netflix hype does not. If you’re already a star, stay there, temporarily anyway, but can you turn down the big bucks? Because Netflix is all about word of mouth, and if you don’t have any, you’re forgotten, all you’re left with is the dollars in your pocket. That sounds good in a cash-focused economy, but the truth is you don’t measure entertainment careers that way, it’s about longevity, sacrificing now for future dollars, always think of the long term cost of your endeavors.

So, if you’re nobody, you might be found on Netflix. If you’re somebody, you might get lost and lose career momentum.

This is the great conundrum of the present. How to take the plethora of productions and get them through the sieve into the eyes and ears of the proletariat. Right now, the sieve is a firehose and the people are drenched and wanting to get out of the way. The question is will it stay this way or will the pipeline narrow? Will we end up with a zillion niches and no ubiquity or the other way around? Now, with so few killer outlets online, i.e. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, it appears that we will see concentration in not only entertainment distribution outlets, we will end up with big winners and a ton of losers. Who will anoint the winners? Probably the distributors. Will Netflix suggest what you made for people to watch? Will Facebook feature your news?

4. Past is not prologue.

Google just sold Zagat.

We’re led to believe the leaders can do no wrong. But Amazon released a flop phone and Google couldn’t succeed with Plus. Turns out Steve Jobs and the Beatles were one of a kind, with everything they did being a success. Oh yeah, Jobs failed with the Cube, but there you’ve got the modern world in a nutshell. People with no power who feel left out are playing gotcha. Do not succumb to the blowback, these people are meaningless, the only ones who have not gotten the memo is them. And when they do… They’ll change their lives like those at the top of this screed. They’ll learn that yelling online is a waste of time, they’ll focus on their in-person lives. We’ve got too many messages to pay attention.

5. Creativity is not quantifiable.

So listen to nobody but yourself. Greatness doesn’t come from painting by numbers, but reaching down deep inside and then vomiting up humanity. We want to feel connected in a disconnected world.

6. Do not spoon-feed.

We live in an on demand culture. Your goal is to create that demand. And when people have it, let them hoover up everything you’ve done. Waiting is passe. Put it out when it’s ready and hope that the public will embrace it and spread the word, hype is more meaningless every day. Look at the movie business, every weekend they spend millions promoting projects that fail. People have too many distractions. If they get the urge, you want to satiate them, let them go deep down the rabbit hole.

No one in Hollywood seems to have read “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

That’s right, we’ve been at the mercy of digital disruption for two decades, but the movie industry believes through sheer force of will it can adhere to the past and drag the public along with it.

But it don’t really happen that way at all.

Here’s the story. We live in an on demand culture. Where we’re the stars of our own movies, where movie stars are fodder for ridicule. Meanwhile, the studio kingpins still think we’re living in the era of appointment viewing, like we’re gonna make time to go to the theatre to see their wares.

Only we’re not.

Unless it’s an event.

That’s right, those superhero movies, that’s what they are. When you lament the passage of seventies flicks, the classic pre-Spielberg slices of life, you’re yearning for an era that’s never coming back. That scene moved to TV.

Which is why the movies need to go day and date. Before their whole distribution paradigm caves.

Although the truth is the two hour flick itself no longer fits our desires. You see if we make time to view, we want to engross ourselves for hours, days, and one skimming the surface flick does not do it for us.

So, if you’re making a movie, make it something that’s better on the big screen, like “Dunkirk,” that plays to everybody. But still, you should make it available on television the day of release, otherwise you’re wasting all your publicity dollars. In an era where this morning’s news is forgotten by tonight, who can remember to watch the movie when it hits the flat screen months later?

So what we had here was a self-congratulatory circle jerk.

They ostracized Ryan Seacrest, we were subjected to the bloviations of fashion critics. E! not only lost cred, Seacrest sacrificed whatever gravitas he possessed, which granted, was not much.

As for Kimmel… He wasn’t as good as last year, but he was pretty damn good in a thankless gig. He knew it wasn’t about him, but he snuck in and made it about him. The two highlights of the production were the jet ski and the visit to the Chinese Theatre. Especially with Helen Mirren playing the role of Carol Merrill.

But that had nothing to do with the movies themselves.

Instead we had the endless tributes to Meryl Street in a moribund flick by the aged hack Steven Spielberg that no one under the age of thirty saw.

Never mind the ultimate winner, “The Shape Of Water.” I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been made, only that that’s not what a movie is anymore, it should have debuted on Netflix, like “Mudbound,” like “Icarus,” then people might have seen it, then it might mean something in the future.

But what was most curious was how the show got beaten back by those working the refs. So scared of alienating the right, there was little Trump-bashing and not much #MeToo. So what you ended up with was a show with no highlights, and ultimately boredom.

But don’t take it from me, just look at tomorrow’s ratings. Which will sink even further. Because when you try to please everyone…

That’s what’s weird about this show, they think they’re playing to everybody and then they honor movies no one has seen.

I remember when baseball was king. MLB makes money, boomers are interested, but everyone else has tuned out.

Meanwhile, they spend a billion dollars on new football stadia when that sport is heading for the cliff.

And the only people in the movie business who don’t know this…

Well, studios make fewer pictures. If it won’t play in China, they don’t want to make it.

And they all make television too.

But we as a nation won’t admit the truth, that times have changed.

Movies used to be the essence of our culture. They were our greatest exportable product. They dominated conversation.

Now it’s about the news.

And if we want escape, if we want truth, we go to Netflix. It’s always ready when we are and there’s truly something for everyone. Series are lying in wait for you to discover them.

Whereas movies are all about TV ads on Thursday night and billboards and reviews for a weekend of play. What kind of business is that?

The Oscars have outlived their usefulness.

It’s not about the host or the producer but the essence of the film business itself.

We want longer stories.

We want access when we hear about something.

We abhor the theatrical experience, especially in an era of 65″ TVs.

We’ve lost all respect for movie stars. They’re just vessels, in most case uneducated.

But we do want stories. We do want escapism.

But we want to dig deep.

Attendance is down.

Netflix subs are up.

You don’t have to be a seer to see what’s happening.

But few in Hollywood want to admit it.